Orissa House adjourned four times over homage to deceased farmers

BHUBANESWAR: The second day of the Orissa Legislative Assembly on Thursday witnessed uproarious scenes forcing the speaker Pradip Kumar Amat to adjourn the House at least four times.

Expectedly, the Opposition members were demanding to pay homage to debt-ridden farmers who committed suicide due to crop loss.

While the Opposition Congress and BJP legislators insisted that the House should observe a minute's silence condoling death of 27 farmers, the ruling BJD opposed the proposal saying that there was no such precedence either in the state Assembly or in other provincial legislatures.

The members of the ruling bench were literarily in for a shock when the Congress chief whip Prasad Harichandan cited several instances when the House paid respect to a former legislator who committed suicide and death of some non-members of the House who died when a boat in which he war traveling got capsized.

Mr Harichandan also cited that the Andhra Pradesh legislature had in the past paid homage to the debt-ridden farmers who ended their lives under stress.

Mr Amat, however, ruled that since there was no precedence of the state Assembly condoling suicidal death of farmers, such a proposal could not be accepted.

The House plunged into pandemonium as the Speaker, soon after rejecting the Opposition demand, called for taking up an adjournment motion on farmer suicide cases. The Congress and BJP members trouped into the well of the House demanding suspension of the business of the House and shouted anti-government slogans.

"Please don't hang the farmers. Allow them to live...Announce a package for them," the agitated legislators were heard as saying in while protesting the Speaker's rejection to pay homage in the House to the "distressed" farmers who ended their life "because of the governmental apathy and neglect."

As similar noisy situation persisted in the afternoon, finance minister Prafulla Chadra Ghadei could not read out his budget speech and was forced to lay the first supplementary statement of expenditure.

Meanwhile, under mounting pressure from the Opposition and civil societies, agriculture minister Damodar Rout announced in the Assembly constitution of a four-member Farmers' Commission to study the reasons of crop failure and farmer suicides.

The Commission will submit its report within six months, Mr Rout told the House.

Former chief secretary Sudhansu Mohan Patnaik has been appointed as the chairperson of the Commission while Western Orissa Development Council chairperson Niranjan Panda, Orissa University of Technology vice chancellor D.P. Ray and economist Sudhakar Panda have been taken as members.